Lian came to us with this already super successful business: she’d launched her first clinic just a few months before and had already expanded into three states with three more in the works. Her team was processing hundreds of tests per location, and eyeing partnerships to expand their testing services to airports and sporting events, but was beginning to feel growing pains.

We came in and identified 18 different projects in various stages of development, focusing on three:

1. A custom booking experience for incoming customers.
2. A clinic management system designed specifically for W4H clinics.
3. Partner API for allowing 3rd-parties access to W4H’s patient data safely and securely.

After our first two weeks, we delivered a prototype design of the user-facing products, complete with a breakdown of the features we’d decided were the highest priority based on our conversations with W4H’s staff. This “product backlog” was the first overview of what was needed to launch the new booking experience and clinic management dashboard Lian’s team had seen. But this backlog contained only the bare minimum functionality we thought necessary—we knew that the only way to get a full picture of what each clinic needed would be to test directly with them.

Four weeks later, we sent our first functional release to clinic staff for onsite testing. After six months of promises from the previous development team, management was ecstatic to see something real. Initial feedback was both overwhelmingly positive and critical to moving forward: our initial prototype didn’t include a number of features that were absolutely necessary for the new system to be useful to clinic management. Without that initial feedback, we wouldn’t have been able to prioritize those features and include them in our MVP scope.

This new system was powered by the same API that we planned to offer partners, and by this point W4H had already secured their first partnership: a series of vending machines placed at 25 international airports and other high-traffic locations, capable of delivering self-administered COVID tests on demand, powered by Swyft. Our product and engineering teams worked alongside Swyft’s to integrate W4H’s systems with theirs, compressing Swyft’s usual 12-week turnaround time into a blistering 6-week delivery window, targeting the launch of W4H’s newest flagship clinic in New York City.

On February 1st, 2021, W4H unveiled their new COVID test vending machines alongside their new flagship clinic in New York City. The launch was a colossal success, with featured articles published in Forbes, the Washington Post and hundreds of other national outlets. It even caught The Tonight Show’s attention, resulting in two separate mentions in Jimmy Fallon’s weekly “Thank You Note” segment.

Alongside the vending machines, we launched W4H’s new booking experience and clinic dashboard, complete with the feedback received from their staff over the previous 12 weeks. The new experience was W4H-branded from top to bottom and allowed incoming patients to book multiple patients at a time, choose appointment times that fit with their schedules and select from each clinic’s available services. This streamlined purchasing flow made it easier than ever before for new patients to book appointments, improving checkout speed and reducing churn.

On the dashboard side, our new system allowed W4H clinics to manage the entire patient lifecycle from a single piece of software. Test results could now be added directly to patient records, cutting the time needed to send test results from 15 minutes per patient to ~30 seconds. These efficiencies reduced overall management overhead by several hours each day, saving clinic operators from long nights manually distributing test results via email.

Sachin is a veteran entrepreneur, clocking in 10 years as the founder and CEO of Alpine Vapors, a manufacturer and distributor of cannabis products in California. His experience in that industry is what led him to begin thinking about Replenish, a Vendor Managed Inventory system that would help brands better support their retailers.

Before coming to us, Sachin had already spent months researching the problem and exploring ways to solve it. Few founders have come to us better prepared: Sachin shared a treasure trove of research, white papers, and his own write-ups on existing solutions for other industries and ways to adapt them to Cannabis. The problem was big, and Sachin’s proposed scope matched it: a product for brands to manage their retailer’s inventory and manage communication between brand reps and their counterparts at dispensaries, a system for tracking retailer inventory across multiple locations, and an API for integrating these systems with existing software used by both parties.

After our first conversations, we proposed starting with our Product Sprint and Roadmapping process to help sort through this complexity, identify our go-to-market strategy, and scope out our initial product. Sachin was interested but wanted to make sure our offer was the best way to move forward, seeking out additional quotes from other providers. A potential joint-venture partner suggested another firm based out of Silicon Valley, and Sachin worked with them to scope out and estimate his MVP.

Sachin described this estimate as “wildly expensive”: $250K/quarter for just three developers. And what that team promised to accomplish with that $250K wasn’t impressive: after three months, the team proposed launching an API-only solution for integrating with existing software. The MVP didn’t include either of the customer-facing products Sachin wanted to build, and the go-to-market strategy for the solution they proposed was left for Sachin to figure out on his own.

Disappointed with the other team’s proposal, Sachin returned to discuss the sprint. We worked together to figure out exactly how much he wanted to spend, and come up with a rough estimate of what we thought we could deliver at that price point. We agreed that the Product Sprint was the best way to give some structure to everything he’d compiled to date, and go to work scheduling our sessions.

Sachin’s demanding schedule as CEO of Alpine Vapors meant we had to adjust our Sprint timelines. Unable to spend 4 hours at a time deep-diving for our initial sessions, we split two-week process into three.

After three weeks, Sachin had in his hands a full, clickable prototype of his initial product. He had a defined roadmap for bringing that product to life, a development estimate that fit his budget—all while delivering on his initial vision and not a stunted version of it.

Our team committed to a 4 week delivery of the initial scope, with plans in place for developing the entire vision over the course of 12 weeks. With the prototype in hand, Sachin could begin sales, lining up Letters-of-Intent from interested customers and building his initial pipeline. And if we started development the Monday after, Sachin could expect to deliver real, functioning value to his first customers just seven weeks after we started this process.

The best part? Our estimate came in at around 50% of his other offer while adding product and design leadership to his Build team. Instead of having 3 engineers working from Silicon Valley, he had a global team led be an ex-Google engineer, an ex-NASA Product Owner, a teacher from one of Europe’s premier design universities leading a team of 2 designers, and the lead engineer from the largest Credit Card company in Argentina leading a team of 4 senior software engineers.

After reviewing our estimate, Sachin gave the greenlight to begin development immediately.

Andy Lin is a rare combination of artist and entrepreneur. In 2009, Andy started the Self-Portrait Project (SPP) to empower people in the creation of their own images. What started off as an art project quickly blossomed into a business, with Andy’s signature one-way mirror photo booth turning heads at events across the country.

Looking ever forward, Andy wanted to productize the SPP experience, pairing an installed-version of the photo booth with a mobile app that could be used to control the device and share the photos taken with it. He began working on this idea, experimenting with different mirror configurations, and hiring a well-known firm to design the mobile experience.

Three years later, Andy had nothing to show but a few failed prototypes and an enormous PDF from the design agency. The designs were sexy—and their presentation from the firm even sexier—but they were functionally incomplete, missing features that were necessary to make the product work. Tired of not making progress, Andy came to us.

We started our process with 1-week Design Sprint, focused on producing a Proof-of-Concept mirror and app experience. We had big questions about the interaction between the hardware, the mobile device, and the server that helped the two communicate, and we wanted to get something in Andy’s hands to test before even discussing what the rest of the app looked like.

One week later, Andy came to our New York office, bringing his signature photo booth with him. We attached a Raspberry-Pi based prototype device to the booth, and handed him a phone, telling him to use it just like the hardware clicker the booth had previously worked with.

Andy stood in front of the mirror, posed, and tapped the phone screen. The camera flashed, and the shutter clicked.

“Now what?” Andy asked.

“Look at the phone.”

There, where the camera button had just been, was the photograph Andy had just captured—relayed from his photo booth, off the Raspberry Pi, through the cloud, and right onto his phone.

“Cool.”

The next week, we started the roadmapping process. We reviewed the designs provided by Andy’s previous agency, pulling out the pieces we liked best, and reconstructed a complete–but drastically simplified—app that aligned with the Self Portrait Project’s existing brand. We gave him a timeline for delivering the core features of the app within the first 4 weeks, reaching his full vision within 12. And then we got to work.

Just a few months later, Andy had a working app in the App Store and mirrors installed across five locations in New York City. To date, SPP has captured over 850K photographs, including those of celebrities like Robert Redford and Hillary Swank, and holds a patent for their signature Photo Booth design.

Not all of our clients come to us before they get started: when we first met Lachie and his team they were already 6+ months into building the MVP for their product Knowhere, a privacy-centric location sharing app targeted at high profile and high net-worth individuals. The app looked beautiful, with a great design and a sexy way to interact with the app’s privacy settings—there was just one problem:

The core feature didn’t work.

Their previous team had spent 6 months of time and $100K of their money building this great app, without figuring out how to actually make the app’s core promise of seamless, in-the-background location tracking work. The solution they’d developed either couldn’t function when the app was closed, or it burnt through the battery in minutes by updating it constantly—an option which wouldn’t make it past Apple’s reviewers.

Lachie came to us looking for a solution, so we proposed a 2-week Roadmapping and R&D session, where we went through their existing work, proposed a number of possible new solutions, and rapidly built Proof-of-Concept apps for each one. After 5 rounds of experimentation, we discovered a fix after reverse engineering the protocol used by competitors like Zenly and Facebook’s Friend Finder.

From there, we spent the next 4 weeks replacing the app’s existing location features with the new Proof-of-Concept, finishing the work that should have been done before starting work on auxiliary features like Settings and Chat. Lachie and his team were ecstatic when we delivered the update—for the first time since getting started, the initial vision they’d had for their product was actually a reality.

After working with Matt and Josh on their previous app, Reveal, they came to us for help building some rapid prototypes using the cash they had left from their previous round of investment: a couple of Hail Mary attempts to find a new product that they could go raise another round with.

This project was super fun: we had a limited budget, and an extremely limited timeline of just a few weeks. We spent the first week Roadmapping with Matt & Josh, figuring out exactly what we could afford to deliver given the constraints we were under. And then we set to work.

2 weeks later, we launched #FIREFIRE, a social app for sharing emojis with friends, inspired by Hey!, reaching the front page of Product Hunt, and hitting a thousand installs in just a couple days. 2 weeks after that, we launched Hotshot Screen Recorder, a tool for capturing mobile screen recordings, annotating them, and sharing them with friends, receiving several mentions from digital outlets for our creative adoption of Facebook’s chat bubbles design for providing an on-screen recording interface.

Because of Matt & Josh’s vision and obsession with delivering value fast, we were able to launch two entirely new products in a single month—a feat that takes many founders years to achieve. And because they were able to focus on pre-sales while our team did the building, those products launched to immediate success, garnering press and 1000s of downloads in their first few days.